a few of the subjects

violet piper

COLLIN’S HANDS ALWAYS SMELL LIKE DRY-ERASE MARKERS. He scribbles proofs onto whiteboards each night in the sallowly lit library, inelastic but adjustable, only ever bending at his narrow hips. He drags the math down to the bottom of the melamine like a window shade. 

He is blond in the photo tacked to his aunts’ fridge in Oakland. They are not his aunts—they are his mother’s cousin and her wife—but Collin says, “You are an aunt if you are middle-aged and a woman and related to someone.” He’s brunette now and has a different smile. 

Bonnie and Sally adopted an abandoned pit bull they named Buddy, but his name might as well be Buddy No, since they say the full expression more often. Shortly after, they adopted Collin, when he was in high school. 

Buddy No paces back and forth in front of Collin and me. I sit Still on Collin’s bed, but more like Rigid, because I’m afraid of dogs and because they will bite me if I act strange (which I will because I’m afraid of them because they bite things). Collin is also Still, but more like Tranquil. When the dog plunks himself down and faces the wall (so we can no longer see each other and act strange), Collin says, “I’m not sure if he’s protecting you from me or me from you.” 

If Collin is ever unsure of something, he’ll tell you. That’s because Collin is seldom unsure and because it’s an exciting feeling for him. For the rest of us, it’s ominous and deflating, which is why I tend to use unassertive expressions like Maybe and Probably and Tend To. 

When Collin is staring at something far away, I like to ask, “What are you thinking?” because he is always thinking, and I want to know everything. He usually says, “I need to stop people from dying.” 

The first time he said that I replied, “You mean your mom?” because his mom has MS, and people with MS tend to die. He said, “More, my sister.” 

“Is she dying?” I asked. 

“Yeah.” 

But I think he meant it in the way that Everyone Is. 

“Are you?” 

“Nope. And maybe I can save my sister.” 

“But your mom?” 

“Probably too difficult.” 

He’s mostly not joking. He thinks he has powers. Sometimes, I think so too.

The other times Collin “needed to stop people from dying,” I just nodded. I don’t think people need to be Saved from death—more like Bailed Out. 

In his dorm’s laundry room, Collin told me I was “good at everything.” He meant everything that involves people. He’s good at everything else, like math. That week, a graduate student from Collin’s lab invited him to San Jose to interview for a job at a tech startup. Collin was only a freshman but completed the interview problems in record time, and they hired him on the spot. He told me they were computer problems, but when he drew the solutions for me on the whiteboard, they all looked like trees. 

“Exactly,” he said. Powers. 

I read more than Collin, but somehow, he knows more words. I run more, but he’s faster. I cry more, but worse things have happened to him. I don’t think I can talk about those. 

I can talk about his weird relationship with food, which is not having one at all. He more like Tolerates it. He eats the same granola every morning and needs the raisins to make up “50% of the mass,” for “nutrition purposes.” Watching him eat is like watching divorcees exchange their kids in the parking lot. It’s like: Hello, Jeff. Hello, Nancy. See you Friday. 

Actually, he does love one food: The Pepridge Farm Chessmen cookies. Those are the worst cookies they make, but the argument isn’t worth it. No argument with him is worth it. For example, Collin is Afraid of heights, but he says he’s just Realistic about them. I never said he was likable. 

I watch over Collin’s shoulder as he builds a new kind of note-taking app on his laptop. He flips back and forth between the code and the images it generates like he’s painting still life. It looks like a Brain Cloud, which I used to call a Venn Diagram before I knew what a Venn Diagram was. Whenever his cursor slides over a bubble, it bobs up and down like it’s suspended in water. 

“People don’t think in straight lines,” he says to himself, his face red-tinted from the computer screen. He always has Night Shift on because he sleeps in blocks of two or three hours throughout the day. He’s difficult to get ahold of, in general, but the most carefree when the sun is down, as if everyone stops dying until the morning. 

Once, we were all horsing around in the quad really late. Collin and Jacob were holding each other’s forearms and laughing, trying to trip each other, when Brian jumped up and landed on their interlocked limbs, pulling Collin’s arm out of its socket. We all screamed, and then Collin turned to me and said, “You need to fix this.”

At the time, I thought he selected me for the task because I’m “good at things.” I grabbed his hand and relocated his shoulder with one terrifying yank. It was the first time we held hands. 

I selected him, too, eventually. The jury’s out as to exactly why. 

Collin has seven shirts and four pairs of pants. That’s it. That’s what he brings to school every semester and lugs back to his aunts’. Four shirts are the same t-shirt in various shades of blue. The fifth one is also blue but says Code Organically on it. The sixth and seventh are black and white, and reference two separate coding events he attended. Because the first four shirts don’t have any text on them, he can’t remember where he got them. I can’t let it go. 

“What brand are they?” I demand. 

“No idea.” 

“Did someone by them for you?” 

“Could be. Maybe my aunt did?” 

“Which aunt? When did you start wearing them? Had you just gotten rid of some other shirts? Who bought you your shirts before your aunts?” 

“I don’t know any of that.” 

He irritates me violently unless we move to a subject we both like. 

“How do human ears perceive loudness?” 

He smiles. “On a logarithmic scale.” 

We quickly ran out of those subjects. He hadn’t held my hand or even spoken to me for months before sending the text: 

“Want to go to a party?” 

I said, “Okay.” 

It turned out not to be a Party so much as an Intimate Gathering of extremely accomplished professors from our university, drinking wine and using esoteric language. I wasn’t even 21 yet, and I just used a thesaurus to come up with Esoteric. 

Actually, Collin and I were the only two guests under forty-five besides the host’s two ruddy-cheeked toddlers. I was closer in age to them, so we played Run This Way, No This Way together while Collin shook people’s hands and summarized his ideas for proofs and apps. We made eye contact across the lawn every half hour or so. 

We weren’t broken up because we were never together, and we were never together because we liked to stand in different places at Intimate Gatherings, and because he didn’t care about clothes or food, and always had to save people from dying, but most of all because we didn’t agree about what love was.